| Saturday, January 27, 2007 |
  1 week game | 
Posted - 1/27/2007 2:25:24 AM | hmm. Rav's got me thinking about that now. i'm not exactly sure if i can start and complete a full game in 1 week. anything i think of that i can do 'quickly' can be done in the shot of this weekend. i've seen what i can do with two weeks, i'm not sure what half of that effort can accomplish.
maybe set some goals for an Inaria style project? what i mean is, set a few basic goals for a kind of game i want to make and just fulfill them.. no drawing outside the lines, if that makes any sense. if that were the plan, i'd have to be able to forecast how long each of the goals might take to complete. i guess it might be a good try at projecting outcomes; experience with project timelines can't be a bad thing, right?
ok, starting tomorrow morning i'll take a look at making a super-simple FFA clone. i'll set some goals and figure out how much time i've got to spend on each of the goals. i'll even make a schedule for the entire week following. for now i'm going to go fall unconscious and maybe before that happens, think a little about that.
thanks for the support, guys! 
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| hmm... | |
Posted - 1/26/2007 8:07:14 PM | sigh.. priorities is right, HopeDagger.
so i stopped the other day and posted what i was doing for basically the last two weeks. day in and day out, i was working on breaking down the format of the .sav file emulators made for FFA.gb. i beat the game last night and i had to stop and scratch my head. why was i doing all of this work again? i don't want to build the game myself. i found some interesting things as i worked along, and learned a few things. but.. why was i doing all of this work to begin with?
i still don't have an answer. as i look over the journal notes i made locally for myself, i can't seem to figure it out. i obsessed for two weeks straight over a game i liked quite a bit, and did some programming and didn't really wind up with anything very tangible. sure, i have a simple trainer that you can alter a few stats with, and a somewhat more complete viewer. um, yay?
i'm taking a step back and reassessing the worth of the project, and i'm finding that there really isn't much point in "completing" it. i could find more neat maps i suppose, but is that really worth obsessing over? i think i'd rather turn to something a little more creative than that. we'll see how i'm feeling about things in the next little while.
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| Thursday, January 25, 2007 |
| FFA sav stuff | 
Posted - 1/25/2007 4:25:34 PM | i've been away for a little while, huh? well, lemme show you what i've been up to. you know how i was obsessing over FFA lately? well let me show you the evil clutch that game has on me:
that's right, i wrote an editor that would let you change the things i figured out in gameboy sav files for FFA. the 2nd pic shows that i started figuring out quite a bit of the format, and i'm actually not far from having the entire 256byte file figured out. (well its actually bigger, but VisualBoyAdvance doesn't see the other part of a proper-sized file)
anyways so i started the whole thing originally because i was curious about what kinds of wierdness i could pull off by hacking sav files. i actually didn't get much. i found a song that didn't make it to the final game, and discovered a couple of items that hadn't been translated because you can't actually get them either. i made silly situations like having the girl as a partner before i saved her -- on the screen where she stood waiting for me to talk to her for the first time...
omg she's got a hot twin~~~
i figured out how to change the names of the boy and girl you choose at the start, to use the special symbols you see in item names...
thats right, you know it!
(read: how demeaning!)
[[read: WHAT A SLUT!!]]
anyways as i was playing around i got tired of looking at UltraEdit and its hex codes. i'd have to do a convert to cram bytes together and then slap them into calc to do some magic.. finding the bytes and figuring out what the numbers were was a real pain. so i decided it might be easier to look at values if they were aligned and converted for me. thus...
i'm far from ready to make a full-on editor, because i haven't mapped out all of the flags and my partner stuff isn't as correct as i want it to be.. not to mention all the story event stuff i still have to track, and all the maps that need to be made so i don't miss anything......
well, anyways, now you know!
[edit: Cytroxian tells me these things are called Trainers.
/me gives a shout out to Cytroxian!]
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| Tuesday, January 16, 2007 |
| Final Fantasy Adventure | 
Posted - 1/16/2007 11:48:00 PM | a local game rental store was selling their old gameboy original copies and i took the opportunity to reclaim one of my favorite games for DMG, Final Fantasy Adventure. i haven't met a single other person who's heard of it. i'm pretty passionate about this game.
anyways, since my resurging interest has all but taken over my mind, i decided it was time to take a 2nd shot at hacking a rom sav file. when you use a .GB rom with a gameboy emulator that had a battery save feature, the game would create a .SAV file. FFA is one such game. my first attempt at mapping a .SAV file was when i was obsessed with Sword of Mana for GBA. i figured out where things were saved, but i couldn't just change those particular values. if you did that, reloading it would cause the save file to appear corrupt, and you couldn't load it.
one of the things i was doing wrong was that i wasn't using a hex editor. i made a program that would compare words and i was (stupidly) outputting the change amount instead of the actual values before and after a change.
so i've got most of the .sav file mapped out for FFA now. i've even written an editor that let you change .sav file values (within limit), but it was limited to the info i had at the start. i know what most of the .sav file does now, and so i could definitely write a more complete editor, but right now i'm looking at mapsets and event flags. i still haven't figured a few little things out yet, and i have to actually play through the game before i can figure those things out.
the (unrealistic) goal right now is to create a "more than you'll ever want to know about FFA" page containing as much of the things i've found out as i can cram into it. i'm not sure about copyright issues and whatnot, because the bulk of the info is actually the data. the project is really a learning exercise for me, more than anything else. if i have to drop the content then i can still write a data-free version and still have come out of it knowing all the new things i found out.
back to my .sav dumps!
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| w0ot | 
Posted - 1/12/2007 6:44:04 AM | 256th post, ftw!
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| Thursday, January 11, 2007 |
| the computer rpg scene | 
Posted - 1/11/2007 5:29:13 PM | well, i put in a bit of effort yesterday to learn about the Ultima series. shame on #gamedev for not knowing your roots! of the 9 people i asked, only 1 person could provide any sort of information about it. i guess, shame on me too. i've done some research though, so now i'm a few points less ignorant than i was before.
i learned quite a bit about the ultima series off of wikipedia. i used to own ultima:exodus and ultima:avatar when i was younger, for the NES, and i played them a little bit. i couldn't beat exodus, the collapsing castle always killed me, and avatar didn't keep my interest in the storyline. mrfun pointed me at an abandonware site and i found ultima 7, and downloaded it along with a newer win32 runtime, exult. i played it for probably 4 hours. i'll probably play it again as research, but its not really my kind of game.
[edit: although A fistful of Ultima 7 makes me wonder if i should go back in and goof around some more ]
looking into my past would reveal that i purchased Neverwinter Nights and Icewind Dale II. they're the only two "big" pc rpgs i've played. i've done the ____Quests and a few c64 d&d games, so i'm not a complete pc-rpg noob. i do know that they were all massively boring to me. i've tried a fair share of console rpgs and some have hooked me, and some have bored me. most of the rpgs i've played on consoles were from japan. i bring this point up because japanese rpgs are very focused peices of software. game budgets don't rely on GTA freedom to make their sales, so you better have a good idea of what you want the experience to be, or it won't likely be done. its hard to sell freedom.
ultima7 let me do some things i've never been able to do in games. for one, you can't usually touch the environment, much less rearrange (or steal!) it. if there was a potion behind a picture in final fantasy, and you checked, it's supposed to be there for you to find. the problem with the amount of items and freedom to do things with them is that most interactions are purposeless. i can pick up a cup off of a table and put it on the floor, or another table, or a bed, or in my backpack. but what would be the point of that? you can pick up and move chairs if you want. for all the added interactivity with the surroundings, the user really isn't getting alot back from all the extra effort you put in to allow for it.
the other thing i thought was a noteworthy difference was that if you did bad things in front of people, they would eventually call the guards. if you took stuff of theirs, they would holler; if you attacked them, they would holler. i killed a barmaid and equipped her to my left hand, walked out of the tavern and talked to some townsfolk. none of them batted an eyelash. what i'm talking about here is that there are no real consequences to doing bad things. i know that there was the reputation thing in Fable, and i own it but haven't played it alot. it was boring too. but its more than consequences. i was expecting people to treat me different when i just took the scroll sitting in front of them and put it in my bag. i was even allowed to keep the things i stole! they didn't fight to keep it or pester you about it. it was gone and they just gave up on it. i stole some things from a clinic, and guards came to teach me a lesson. i killed them in front of the person than hollered for them and when the battle was done, i talked to him again and his script ran exactly the same as if i hadn't stolen or killed in front of him at all. i was most disappointed about that.
the thing i wanted to do with actionRPG most was to have a few party characters that would actually 'live' to a certain degree. they would interact with you sometimes, change moods, have opinions about your actions, and basically act as something more than just a pet. i'm probably dreaming the same dream many people that write rpgs do. i don't want to have a fully-featured 3d rendering engine and a plot that will beat any FF game (though that wouldn't be too hard nowadays). i want the games i play to last past beating the end boss and watching the final cg movie. i'm not so sure if i want to have a world full of useless cups, but i DO want to have more interaction than i've been getting.
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| ambitions | |
Posted - 1/9/2007 1:07:41 PM | i've only got a little time to drop a quick line in here. i was distracted pretty bad by the holidays and lost track of what i was doing in Space Fortress. i've got a general idea of what i want to do with it, but i didn't actually sit down and consider the direction to take from where i'm at. i'm not giving up on the project.
while we were chatting the other day, viridian pointed me at a Diablo clone, Fate, and i gave it a whirl. i was surprised at how good it was. it ain't no actionRPG, but it was well worth the install. after playing this and Inaria, i'm getting interested in pursuing actionRPG again.
i'm a finicky person. i started up Space Fortress because i was interested in Membrane Madness, and HopeDagger was a big influence on my motivation. when the holidays hit, the influence was gone and there was no real drive to get anything more done, so i ended up fiddling and interest waned.
now i've got viridian's influence causing rekindled interest in actionRPG. i didn't get anywhere with this one because i was so unfocused. i think that if i'm still as interested in Inaria tomorrow as i was yesterday, i might built actionRPG to that point. time will tell.
[edit!
i went down to a local game store today and they had their rental copy of Final Fantasy Adventure up for sale! i couldn't resist buying it. if you've seen actionRPG, and you know the game, you'll know that i grabbed the hero graphics from screencaps of FFA. i'm getting sucked in!]
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| Inaria madness | |
Posted - 1/8/2007 4:10:01 PM | i've been playing viridian's Inaria last night and today, and here's a little random retardedness i felt was worth sharing:
the collection is almost complete!
speed run!
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| particleDemo update | |
Posted - 1/7/2007 8:54:08 PM | i figured that while i was at it, i might as well upload and repost about my fix for my particle demo:
particleDemo.zip [212.36 KB]
- logic updated properly, no logic skipping
- alpha blended circlefills
- looks yummy
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| sgTicTacToe | |
Posted - 1/7/2007 5:42:23 PM | i finally got around to completing my rewrite of my tictactoe GDS entry. have a look, it should work fine now. i took out the bad AI and made it a 2p only game. acidwillburnyou from #gamedev is looking at c#, asked for a hand, and i figured it was a great time to pull the code out and get it working again.
obligatory screenshot!
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